Shop Safety Highlight - Sucess on Day Twelve of Student Teaching

The Journey of Student Teaching: Day Twelve

Special Class Reflection: A Different Look at Teaching Shop Safety

Essential Questions for Today: 

• Look back and Reflect upon your experiences of Week One.

During my experiences at the National FFA Convention during the Pre-Student Teaching Inquiry Based Instruction Workshop I attended one of the last questions we were asked was: "How were we taught shop safety"

Though I didn't have an Ag Shop Safety I can say that I was taught shop safety through my experiences in Project Lead the Way.  When I try to remember how I learned shop safety I think it went something like this:

1. Teacher Lectured
2. I was bored
3. Teacher gave us a test
4. I was bored

One of the questions we were asked then as future teachers is: "If this is how we were taught how can we use Inquiry Based Instruction  to make a lesson on safety more important for the students?"

Look at IBI I can see that the old way of teaching shop safety was very Teacher led. So I asked myself is there a way to make it more student led and still be successful in teaching students shop safety?

I originally came up with this idea:
"Have the students create a shop safety manual for the class."

The only instruction I supplied was five bullet points of directions and a list of equipment they needed to have in their safety manual.

As a result the students created by researching on their own the equipment in the shop and created a safety handbook of the shop.  When they were happy with what was completed they took a quiz on shop safety using their handbook as the only resource they could use. The students were able to pass shop safety and as a class they felt very much at ease with working in the shop as well. 


Reflecting on the Lesson I want to highlight how I felt this project went with the students and how if used IBI and what ways could I add to the lesson to make it more IBI:

Engage: Here I think the project was between a B and C because though I gave them a list of minimal guidelines for the project the students asked more questions. For example my one guideline was the directions must explain how you operate the equipment. The students asked their own questions such as well what counts as operating the equipment? Where can we find this information on operating the equipment? How can we turn directions into something we as students can understand and follow? by them asking their own questions  they not only clarified their own questions but they also added to their own as well.

Evidence: When it came to collecting evidence the only question I was asked by the students was "Is this good enough or should we add more?" That would trigger me to ask them more questions to see if they could determine more on their own. So with this they mostly directed and determined what was evidence and I just told them when they gathered enough evidence. Here I would say that this is between a C and D with evidence gathering.

Explanations:  Here I would say this is fully D because the students determined what was the answers as well.  All they were told was broad criteria in the sense of a topic and then they filled in the data they wanted for that topic. I didn't tell them what could be in their explanations only if I thought they could use more.  No matter what I said though the explanations were written for the students by the students.

Connections:  Here the sense can get hazy again just because it is not safety in the sense of science lab safety but instead shop safety. I think though that this class gave my students more confidence in safety and ways to actually develop safety for their own purposes.   So here I would say that this one was around and A and B range because I really helped them make the connections in the class to what else they may be doing. 

Communication:  Here I would say that this one was D range. The only instructions i gave them was that it had to be a guide book.  They came up with what was put into the guide book. I think that is D range because the students took the concept of a guidebook and went with it to create their own safety manual. The best part is that another class period also did this as their shop safety and both classes end results, though they covered similar topics, had 100 % completely different products at the end. The only thing that were similar were the objectives that the guide hit, how they were written, their layout, their design, everything else was 100 % different.

I think this was one of the most successful projects I came up with and I feel like I will use this for my classes in the future as well.